Tag Archives: firefox-beta

This week, Matthew is going to give you a little preview of Firefox 4 Beta 7. He wants all of you to see why he believes Firefox is most definitely still in the running for best browser available.

The only issue Matt has seen is that Aero crashes when he opens this Beta. Mozilla has integrated a lot of new features and a nice speed boost. One of the nicest inclusions is the way you can organize your tabs now. This gives you a visual overview of all open tabs, allowing them to be sorted and grouped. Additionally, your tabs are now on top by default.

You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar. There’s a new Addons manager which makes it much easier for you to sift through your extensions and decide what you want to enable, disable or update. The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like). And, the stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button.

There are many other improvements to this already powerful browser. Have you checked out the new beta yet? What are your thoughts?

Jordan LeBlanc wrote an email to me recently, which appears below. He tried out the beta version of Firefox 4.0 for his Mac, and he wasn’t very happy with the results. He did the right thing in reporting the bug that annoyed him. I’m not sure, though, that I agree with uninstalling and ceasing to use a beta for that reason alone. The whole point of being a beta tester is to continue to update the builds, continue testing it and continue reporting any problems.

Hey Chris:

Just wondering if you have spent any time using Firefox 4.0 beta on the Mac, and if so, what are your thoughts on it?

I took it for a test drive today and I am sad to say that after 5 minutes, I uninstalled the darn thing. It showed promise — it was actually really fast – more so than Safari 5, and perhaps even slightly faster than Chrome. But — and this was the killer for me — it kept placing a 2nd icon on my dock for no apparent reason! At first I thought it was pop ups, but when you click on the icon… nothing happens. When you use dock expose on the Firefox app, it only shows one window. It is just some weird, random and useless icon that keeps appearing no matter how often you close it. After 5 minutes, I decided it was too much of an annoyance, and I uninstalled the beta – but not before I provided feedback about the issue via the “why Firefox made me sad” feedback menu.

It’s sort of sad, because Firefox used to be an amazing browser back in the day when it was designed to be fast, bloat free, and have a small footprint. If I remember correctly, that was the whole point to Firefox! If you wanted something slow and bloated you used IE or Mozilla’s full client. IMHO, Firefox started going downhill when they lost sight of that vision, and began adding all these crazy add-ons and themes. It has become the very thing it had been created to challenge.

Guess I’ll be sticking with Safari and Chrome for the foreseeable future. Firefox just isn’t what it used to be.

Have you tried out the beta version yet? What are your thoughts on it overall? Do you have any specifics praises or concerns that you want to share with the community?